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The Year of Organization

One of the many resolutions for 2017 is that it is going to be the year of organization. As an example of my lack of organization skills, here is a photo of my basement workbench. I have not made any progress on my goal so far.

You can see the remains of a number of different projects piled up in a mound on the far end of the workbench. I have a habit of finishing a project, and then leaving the tools where they are on the workbench, and then piling them up when I start the next task. I do at least finish the projects, its the cleaning up part that I don’t care for. You’ll also see a large vintage Kitchenaid Mixer in the back of the pile. That’s another project that I should work on this year. My mother had that mixer for close to forty years when it started to make a grinding noise, so she bought a new mixer. I suggested that I might be able to fix the mixer, rather than having it end up in the dump. That was more than a year ago. And this is just the workbench, my desk is in the same condition as the workbench.

It’s not as though I have not been able to accomplish resolutions in the past. Last year’s big resolution was to try to cook one new recipe a week. We somehow managed to come up with 58 new recipes during the year. I was supposed to write blog posts about the best new recipes, but I never got around to that either. Another goal is to post on the blog more often, or at least go from a “seldom” frequency to “infrequent”. A food related goal is much easier than this organizing goal, since I love food and I don’t much care for organizing anything. (On yet another tangent, somewhat related to the new recipe project is that this year I’m supposed to try to loose some weight too.)

In the quest to fulfill this organization goal, maybe by publicly admitting that I have a problem will force me to actually accomplish this goal. So, sometime during the year I will get this workbench organized, and the desk too, and get that mixer fixed. Maybe I’ll work on getting the file cabinet organized too.

My garage was in a similar state (and had been for years) and it sometimes took me as long to find the tools for a job as the job did itself.
I finally built a workbench, bought three tool chests and labelled all the drawers with dynotape so I knew what was in them. I can find stuff more quickly now and jobs take less time. I’m also better at putting the tools back where they should be.
Good luck getting organised, it is a Herculean task.

I’ve only once had to buy a new tool because I could not find the one I already had, but it’s often a struggle to find things. It’s not the organizing that will be the problem, it’s the staying organized! I have to take the time to maintain the clean desk and work bench.